Q&A: A Professor Pushes for Greener NYC

Urban farming is having its moment in the sun. Earlier this spring, officials announced that the world’s largest rooftop garden will be built in Sunset Park. And as the Journal reported Wednesday, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is packing the farm bill with New York-centric ideas.

To discuss the state of New York’s greening, Metropolis checked in with Dickson Despommier, the microbiologist at Columbia University who advocates for urban greenhouses he calls “vertical farms.”

Wall Street Journal:Is it that hard to have the biggest rooftop garden in the world? I mean, are there a lot of rivals?

It’s a good thing, don’t get me wrong. But a roof is just one layer of a building. A vertical farm is the entire building.

WSJ:Like a skyscraper of nothing but greenhouses, right?

Right. And so let me take you on a quick trip around the world. We have NuVege, selling radiation-free vegetables from a three-story vertical farm 30 miles from Fukushima in Japan. We have The Plant, in Chicago. And then the best of them all so far, The Plantagon, a true vertical farm tower in Sweden. A rooftop garden, again, is very nice and very good news and it will do lots of good. But if New York City doesn’t act soon, it’ll be left in the dust.

WSJ:What do you think the holdup is? Bloomberg is anti-smoking, anti-transfat, anti-salt, pro-bicycles, pro-pedestrians, all these health initiatives. And also big on city development — Moynihan Station, The rebuilt World Trade Center, Atlantic Yards, Hudson Yards, all that. Seems like vertical farms would fit well in his mix, no?

What this city needs is a Moses.

WSJ:Robert Moses?

Pssh. Not him. He had his time. The real Moses. We need someone to part the seas and give the city a path to walk forward.

WSJ:There’s been some of that. The recent exemption for greenhouses to the weight allowed on a rooftop. But you want, what? An Empire State Building vertical farm?

If you know how to crawl, start walking already. Maybe even trotting. I mean, just look at Queens, all that empty, wasted warehouse space out there. It’s not such a waste just because, oh, this could be a vertical farm and help my mission. It’s that these farms fix hunger, they fix unemployment, they fix health, they develop a sense of connection and community, they do all the best things a city structure can do.

WSJ:What about Staten Island? Lots of fields and such out there.

Staten Island is just a place for all the pollution of the Hudson to meet all the pollution from New Jersey. It should be a separate city.